Casualties of the Class War

“This past Thursday, a Modesto, California, man whose house was in foreclosure shot and killed the Sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him from his condominium unit. Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers to counter-attack, and it ended Waco-style, with the fourplex structure burning to the ground with the shooter inside.

It’s not surprising that this should happen in Modesto: Last year the Central California city’s foreclosure rate was the third worst in the country, with one in every 19 properties filing for foreclosure. The entire region is ravaged by unemployment, budget cuts, and blight — the only handouts that Modesto is seeing are the surplus military equipment stocks being dumped into the Modesto police department’s growing arsenal.

The shooter who died was 45 years old and he appears to have lost his condominium over a $15,000 home equity loan he took out almost a decade ago, owed to Bank of America. The condo was sold at an auction for just $12,988 to a shady firm, R&T Financial, that doesn’t even have a listed contact number. Too much for the former security guard, who barricaded himself in the condo which had been in the family for decades. He refused to walk out alive.

These “death by foreclosure” killings have been going on, quietly, around the country ever since the housing swindle first unraveled.”

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14 Responses

Clearly this is a “ruling class” against the rest of us scenario. Not a $$ class issue. I think the real battle is being hidden by lots of fomented race and income agitation. It’s the ruling class we need to fight, not each other.

The class war is usually framed as rich vs poor, with “rich” increasingly defined downwards. I think we’re at the point where, if you can afford to send your kids to private school, you’re “rich”, or at least a rich sympathizer.

In truth it is the elites — not the top 1%, but maybe the top 1% of the top 1% — and their fellow travelers against the middle class, with the underclass as their weapon.

JPG said it more clearly than I. The ruling class may all be wealthy (although I suspect there are some pretty power hungry beaurocrats and law enforcement officials that may make less than a non-ruling class citizen), but not all wealthy people are in the ruling class. Money doesn’t always equal worldly power, especially if one uses his resources to clothe, educate and provide housing for many other people.

You are using “ruling class” to mean “political rulers”. I would say that whether or not one has direct political power is somewhat beside the point. If you click and read the article you can see how non-political rich people wield economic power, destroying lives while enriching themselves. Further, riches mean a disproportionate share of political power; look at the influence that wealthy individuals and corporations have on the political process; even if their motive is insuring big profits, they use their money to buy polilticians.

I would think that anyone who believes in the supreme efficacy of the free market would recognize that money is power, and commerce has far more influence over our world than politics. The check book is mightier than the ballot box, and anyone with a lot of money has a lot of power even if he isn’t using it or is using it for good.

Maybe I am just taking all this class envy too personally. I live in an upper middle class neighborhood. We all have been accused of being “rich” and “not doing our fair share” and it is bemusing. Most of this small neighborhood are small business owners. They are very involved in the community, provide jobs and pay enormous amounts of taxes. Not all of them have 9 chidren like we do, so they do have some benefits from their positions i.e. nice cars, vacations and what not. I don’t get the constant refrain that this is somehow evil, unfair or wrong. Like JPG said, the definition of “rich” is increasingly being defined downward. In reference to your “The rich keep getting richer” post, I certainly am not represented in that post. But is it wrong to send my children to the Catholic high school? Does that make me rich? If so, does that make me evil? Does the fact that I don’t work outside the home, but home educate my children (not in high school) and run our home make me rich? I’ve gotten this confusion at this blog before, and the part the really gets me is I never thought of us on “different sides”. But lately over and over I feel the divisions creeping in because my husband makes more money than the national average. Ok. I am taking this personally, and therefore, am not being objective. I’ll leave it at that.

Renee, I think the irony is that those of us in lower-middle and poor class probably envy your position most of all even though yours is not the wealthy ruling class that truly is waging class war in this country. The thing is, the life style you describe is just what a working class person would have expected 50 years ago, and it is that memory and the realization that that lifestyle has been forcibly taken away from the working class that stokes anger. It is unfortunate that anger is often directed at the people who have what we deserve, rather than the people who have taken away what we deserve. It is equally unfortunate that the wealthy ruling class (and just for a very rough and ready number I’ll say net worth 10 million and up) has largely succeeded in recruiting the majority of your class into voting for their political puppets, thus collaborating in our deprivation. So when the suburban ring around every major city goes Republican I think we have good reason to ask, “Which side are you on?” But no, I don’t think people who can afford to send 9 kids to Catholic school, take vacations, and have only one money earner should feel guilty. They should just join in solidarity with those of us who are aspiring to the same standard of life.

Thank you Zeb, I can understand what you are saying. Politically, I am a woman without a home. A disgusted woman without a home. I can’t get behind the Democrats, really, for a variety of reasons, but have a really difficult time being enthused about Republicans. Both parties are run by very wealthy individuals who do not even have to live by the policies they implement on the rest of us. Both are in it for the power, it seems to me, and use such vile tactics to gain support. Currently, the divide and distract mentality has me very upset, because it it pitting citizens against each other, rather than actually fixing any real issues. I don’t even know what the answer is, but I know having people of faith fighting with each other isn’t a good thing. Maybe it is just a time we are called to suffer, in a variety of ways. Let me ask you this. How could I stand in solidarity with you? Is it only by voting a particular way, or are there other concrete ways we can stick together?
p.s. we don’t take vacations, really, short of visiting relatives driving distance. We are the masters of the staycation.

Renee, sorry if you take any of this personally. I don’t post these things that chronicle the shape the nation is in with anyone in particular in mind. I do feel a resposiblity to publicize the state of things, though. Zeb is right: the life you describe was once the life of the working class. Now it is only the affluent who can afford it. My dad had an eighth grade education and worked in an auto factory. He always drove a new car, we eventually had a vacation cabin up north, he sent us to Catholic schools, and he had money for his kids college, though only I took up the offer, and then only for a badly lived year (I later got a degree, a real moneymaker in theology).
I similarly have a blue collar union job and it is tough with 7 kids and a wife who stays at home.
And while this is anecdotal, the sort of statistics and charts that I have been presenting here over the last year or two show that it is not an isolated experience: the middle and working classes are losing, even while productivity has gone up and the wealthy grow ever richer. And when I read of the literal looting of the homes and savings of the middle classes, like in the article I linked to, yes, it makes me very angry.
The injustice in this country is such that if revolution is not justified here it has never been justified, ever. I just hope it can remain nonviolent.

Daniel, in your opinion, is there such a thing as white-collar middle class? Because that is what I would call my neighborhood. And it is getting squeezed badly, and there are no white collar unions, and very little political attention paid, short of cranking up the taxes and eliminating the exemptions. I am in total agreement that this country is headed toward massive unrest because of injustice and the beginings of tyranical government intervention in every nook and cranny of our lives. What I disagree with you on (I think) is that the only people being treated unjustly are the poor, blue collar workers and immigrants.

Also, the solidarity question from above. It is true that my husband makes a decent salary, but we spend most of it on raising our family and buying our own health insurance and educating the kids (Catholic H.S. and community college). Anyway, how can we be in solidarity beside voting, which I already understand. How can we stick together?

It used to be you could get a decent job with out a master’s degree. Now, even though I have a bachelor’s in science and experience, I am not allowed to teach at a local community college without a master’s degree. And I would have to go into debt to do that. Every field now requires so much more education, that is so terribly over priced, and all the loans are now through the government, which puts these licensing requirements on so many of the professions. Makes me dizzy, but there is no way now, with the “credential crazy” culture we live in, tnat anyone with an eighth grade education could support anykind of decent life style. We are in total agreement about that.

The term “middle class” is problematic, as everyone from the working poor to those with 6 figure incomes consider themselves “middle class”. Few aside from billionaires consider themselves wealthy, and even those most of us consider quite well off view themselves as struggling. One man’s struggle is another man’s gravy train, is all I can say to that. Perhaps they dostruggle, in a way, but that really is nothing compared to the sort of thing that the lower rings of the middle class, let alone real working class or poor people struggle with, like choosing between health care and food, or working minimum wage jobs, and so on.
As for how solidarity can be expressed, that also is problematic, as there is little opportunity for opposition to the vast injustices that rule. I had high hopes for the Occupy movement, though I haven’t heard much from them of late; don’t know if that is because the media grew bored, or if they are working quietly elsewhere (I have heard of some attempts by them in resisiting foreclosures). Obama is obviously going to make a lot of these concerns central to his reelection campaign, though there are all sorts of reasons to be skeptical.
But obviously, voting for anyone who supports policies that perpetuate the problem should not be considered, and that includes just about every Republican I can think of. So we establish solidarity by not voting?
The lack of viable options is one of the most frustrating things about the situation. Me, I just write, which is about all I can do; trying to awaken my fellow pilgrims to the situation.
One final note: the proverbial eighth grade educated guy can no longer make a decent living because of government-supported corporate policies. That corporations were allowed to and even encouraged to move their production overseas where they hired workers at poverty wages, with no environmental regulations, is a huge scandal.